Every seo practitioner these days are well aware of the Google’s policies they need to follow to survive in the online world. Policies and norms have been set by various search engines to provide a useful, informative and relevant data as well as an environment to the users and ensure the optimum quality of user experience. Securing a higher rank in the SERPs requires fighting head to head with the ever dynamic and current SEO trends and being consistent with the approach to adapt to any new search algorithm update.

On the flip side, there are fellas who try to defy the general disciplines of SEO by fooling search engines and manipulating search algorithms by bringing organic traffic to their websites without paying any heed to the rules. The use of seo practices that do not live up to the standards of Google Webmaster Guidelines is known as Black Hat SEO Practices. Half of such practices we have already discussed in our previous blog, the other half we’ll discuss today.

Few More Popular Black Hat SEO Techniques

Cybersquatting/ Domain Squatting: Cyber and domain are two words that every individual who’s been part of this industry are familiar with. As of Squatting, it is the unlawful and forced occupying of an abandoned or vacant piece of land or a building, not commercial, that the squatter does not have any right over, does not own, rent or carry any official permission to use. Similarly, Cybersquatting aka, Domain Squatting is the unlawful registration of General top-level domains (gTLDs) of someone else’s trademark or business for the sole purpose of getting financial benefits. The gTLDs that are similar to the copyrighted or trademarked names, words or phrases are safeguarded under the Uniform Domain-Name Resolution Policy (UDRP) that means the owner of the trademark and copyright have the full right over the domains registered in bad faith.

Google Bombing: If you can’t take yourself up, take your competitors down. Yes, this is what best describes the next Black Hat Seo Practice. Google bombing is the practice of taking your competitor’s search rankings down by manipulating their search results. This includes setting up negative pages, forums, leaving negative reviews or setting negative media campaigns in order to generate user-created web pages to redefine or recontextualize a particular keyword. Media campaigns are put in place to boost the popularity of certain terms and phrases especially the negative ones. Google bombing do make the websites rank higher in the SERPs but for irrelevant, unrelated or off-topic search terms by linking them to these negative pages or media campaigns.

Mirror Sites: Creating mirror sites can be described as the act of copying a substantial amount of content from another website or creating a website with the same content that is there on your main website to increase its ranking. This is similar to duplicating content from your website or any other website. People who undertake this Black Hat Seo Technique usually tries to cover this act by stating that they are using it to overcome DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks.

Parasite Hosting: Parasite hosting is another Black Hat Seo Technique wherein hackers host a website on another individual’s computer or server for SEO purposes. This is considered an unethical way of gaining access to someone else’s website by generating a webpage on it and stuffing it with lots of keywords and backlinks that point back to the commercial page. Hackers do that so that they can gain access and take advantage of highly respected and authoritative domains with a high page ranking. This way that website would receive high organic traffic and money for their website.

Comment Spamming: Certain websites leave their comments section open for the blogs, videos and more to receive tips and suggestions from the general public all across the web. Comments carry very useful, informative and relevant content and thus play an important in search engine rankings, that’s why search engines keep a close check on them. Since comments are monitored by the search engines for ranking purposes, the seo rule breakers put advertisements and target keywords in comments. Google looks after this Black Hat Seo practice by penalizing the websites that have an unnatural amount of spammy links from comments.

Scraper Sites: Scraper sites copy content from other websites and present them as their own. Scraper websites copy relevant and valuable content from high authority websites and republish it on their own. The web or content scraping can be either done manually through simple copy and paste or through automated software tools knows as content scrappers. Using scraped content for legitimate purposes is a different ball game, but creating websites with scraped content, which are known as scraped sites, is unethical, since all the public domain website content is protected by copyright law, so publishing it as your own is a fraudulent practice.

Pingback Spam: A pingback is one of four types of linkback methods wherein an automatic request is sent to the Web Author whenever when a link has been created to a person’s blog post from an external website so that a reciprocal link to the website can be created. Though Pingbacks is a great way to know when another website link to your website’s blog post, seo spammers have found a way to misuse this method, turning it into a Black Hat Seo Practice. In case you have set up automatic pingbacks on your blogs, any website that links to you will also get a reciprocal link back to their website right on your blog post, irrespective of how spammy it is. These low key and spammy links will eventually hurt the reputation and integrity of your own blog posts in Google’s and other search engine’s eyes.

To sum up everything we have explained and narrated in these two blog posts, we would just like to say that using these unethical and irrelevant seo practices would only give you instant results in the short-term, for the long term you are only risking your website by getting it penalized and banned from Google search results. So play fair and win fair.